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rfmcdonaldI made the two-part Shakespeare photo post because I'm really very very fond of Shakespeare, suspect you'd be fond of him too, and wanted to share some images of his more recent poses with you. I suppose that I particularly--really?--wanted to share them with you because they're cute. I don't go actively seeing LOLcat images, although I can appreciate the ones that I happen upon while reading blogs and Facebook status updates, but when I see something like Shakespeare lying relaxed and sprawled out on top of my futon, or cute kittens, or a fluffy plush stuffed animal, or an animated robot looking out with yearning eyes ... There are so many things that look vaguely human-like that humans relate to at a very fundamental level.
(Oh, look: Wired linked to a picture of a baby meerkat! I copied it: Look right. Isn't it so cute?)
Daniel Roth made the point of the power of this bond in his January 2009 Wired article "Do Humanlike Machines Deserve Human Rights?", which dealt with how and why people felt horrible about videos of anthropomorphic toys being abused (here, videos of Tickle-me-Elmo being set on fire) and what should be done about it. Shall cuteness give the right robots rights?
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How many of you haven't seen the famous recent XKCD comic featuring the Mars rover Spirit that managed to bring readers to tears with its depiction of the lonely abandoned rover? It's this kind of emotion that drives the Internet's desire for cuteness; it's this kind of emotion, as Mary Roach observes, also at Wired, that helps drive the Japanese economy. Everyone, you see, likes cuteness. Everyone.
In the December 2009 Vanity Fair, Jim Windolf makes the same point as Roth about the biological origins of cuteness.
Everything, from cars to hipster magazines to gossip columns to cars to Internet applications (Google! Twitter!), Windolf says, is laden with cuteness. And he doesn't like it, since, he suggests, a societal desire for pervasive cuteness in adulthood is a sign of protracted adolescence, which is itself a sign of protracted societal misery produced by feelings of helplessness. "America is a nation in need of a hug, a Snickers, and the nucleus-accumbens squirt provoked by baby-animal photos, laughing-baby clips, and bathetic movies," he concludes.
So what do you think? Is cuteness a sign of dependency or some other such thing, or is it just cuteness? Is cuteness a good thing or a bad thing? Are questions of ethics completely irrelevant to the discussion of pictures of cute kittenz?
(Oh, look: Wired linked to a picture of a baby meerkat! I copied it: Look right. Isn't it so cute?)
Daniel Roth made the point of the power of this bond in his January 2009 Wired article "Do Humanlike Machines Deserve Human Rights?", which dealt with how and why people felt horrible about videos of anthropomorphic toys being abused (here, videos of Tickle-me-Elmo being set on fire) and what should be done about it. Shall cuteness give the right robots rights?
.
The brain is hardwired to assign humanlike qualities to anything that somewhat resembles us. A 2003 study found that 12-month-olds would check to see what a football-shaped item was "looking at," even though the object lacked eyes. All the researcher had to do was move the item as if it were an animal and the infants would follow its "gaze." Adults? Same reaction.
The perennial concern about the rise of robots has been how to keep them from, well, killing us. Isaac Asimov came down from the mountaintop with his Three Laws of Robotics (to summarize: Robots shouldn't disobey or hurt humans or themselves). But what are the rules for the humans in this relationship? As technology develops animal-like sophistication, finding the thin metallic line between what's safe to treat as an object and what's not will be tricky. "It's going to be a tougher and tougher argument to say that technology doesn't deserve the same protection as animals," says Clifford Nass, a Stanford professor who directs a program called the Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab. "One could say life is special—whatever that means. And so, either we get tougher on technology abuse or it undermines laws about abuse of animals."
It's already being considered overseas. In 2007, a South Korean politician declared that his country would be the first to draw up legal guidelines on how to treat robots; the UK has also looked into the area (though nothing substantial has come of it anywhere). "As our products become more aware, there are things you probably shouldn't do to them," says John Sosoka, CTO of Ugobe, which makes the eerily lifelike robot dinosaur Pleo (also tortured on Web video). "The point isn't whether it's an issue for the creature. It's what does it do to us."
How many of you haven't seen the famous recent XKCD comic featuring the Mars rover Spirit that managed to bring readers to tears with its depiction of the lonely abandoned rover? It's this kind of emotion that drives the Internet's desire for cuteness; it's this kind of emotion, as Mary Roach observes, also at Wired, that helps drive the Japanese economy. Everyone, you see, likes cuteness. Everyone.
In the December 2009 Vanity Fair, Jim Windolf makes the same point as Roth about the biological origins of cuteness.
In the 1940s, ethologist Konrad Lorenz proposed—correctly, as it turns out—that we instinctively want to nurture any creature that has a cute appearance.
“Lorenz suggested that infantile characteristics—big head, big eyes, the very round face—stimulate caretaking behavior,” says Marina Cords, a professor of ecology, evolution, and environmental biology at Columbia University. “I study blue monkeys in Kenya every year and I have the same reaction. I find the infants are very cute. I was taught by my adviser never to tell anybody that was a motivation for anything we do, which is true. But it’s hard not to have that gut reaction.”
A scientific study that came out this year is the first to offer firm evidence that human beings undergo a chemical reaction deep in their brains when they look at babies. It was conducted by biologist Melanie Glocker of the University of Muenster, while she was a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, and it has resulted in two groundbreaking papers published in the journals Ethology and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Specifically, Glocker’s series of experiments demonstrated that the act of looking at baby pictures stirs up an ancient part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens.
“It’s in the midbrain,” Glocker says, with a slight Teutonic accent, “which is an evolutionarily older part of the brain involved in reward processing. This region has also been shown to be activated by a variety of rewarding stimuli, including sexual stimuli, food stimuli, and drug stimuli.”
Everything, from cars to hipster magazines to gossip columns to cars to Internet applications (Google! Twitter!), Windolf says, is laden with cuteness. And he doesn't like it, since, he suggests, a societal desire for pervasive cuteness in adulthood is a sign of protracted adolescence, which is itself a sign of protracted societal misery produced by feelings of helplessness. "America is a nation in need of a hug, a Snickers, and the nucleus-accumbens squirt provoked by baby-animal photos, laughing-baby clips, and bathetic movies," he concludes.
“There’s no doubt that cuteness has been a part of the Japanese aesthetic since the postwar years,” says Roland Kelts, the author of the 2006 book Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S. “One theory, which has been proposed by a lot of Japanese artists and academics, is that, after the humiliation and emasculation of Japan in the postwar years, Japan developed this quasi-queer position of ‘little brother’ or ‘little boy.’ If you become ‘little brother’ or ‘little boy,’ the only way you can get big brother’s or fat man’s attention is by being so cute or puppy-like that he has to take care of you.”
Just as Japan produced Mighty Atom and countless toys and gadgets out of what was, arguably, a desire to show its dependency, America is now coming up with cute products and images to express its own sense of need in the wake of the hard times and lousy decisions of the go-it-alone Bush administration.
“It is really important to understand the notion of dependency inherent in cuteness and how that emerged in Japan after the war,” says Kelts, whose mother grew up in occupied Japan and whose father is American-born.
This desire to “show the face of dependency,” as Kelts puts it, also turns up online, whenever people add cute-animal photos to their blogs or post baby pictures on their Facebook pages. “The old idea that you want your privacy is bleeding away into this new idea that you are desperate to be known,” he says. “And if you are desperate to be known, you need a strategy for being known, and a very good strategy is the old evolutionary one of being so cute that you need to be cared for. That was, in a sense, Japan’s position for the last 60 years: ‘We will make your products really, really well, and we’re going to be the best little boy you can imagine.’”
[. . .]
Maybe the same anxiety that has given rise to the Matrix movies, to the latest Bruce Willis action vehicle, Surrogates, and even to highbrow works like Kazuo Ishiguro’s lovely novel Never Let Me Go is in play whenever we take solace in the kittens and puppies of sites like Cute Overload or Cute Things Falling Asleep, or turn our iPod wheels to the unthreatening and unmechanized sounds of Sara Bareilles. The cuteness craze may represent a nostalgia for a lost world. Or maybe we’re trying, in some pathetic way, to animate our machines, to imbue them with sounds and images that strike at the deepest part of what it means to be human: our desire to take care of helpless creatures. We’re like those office workers of the 1960s and 1970s who tried to beat back the alienation they felt as a result of being the first people to inhabit sterile-seeming cubicles eight hours a day by putting up that poster of the cute little kitten hanging from the tree.
So what do you think? Is cuteness a sign of dependency or some other such thing, or is it just cuteness? Is cuteness a good thing or a bad thing? Are questions of ethics completely irrelevant to the discussion of pictures of cute kittenz?
